Hospitallers of St John of God [Barmherzige Brüder; Milosrdní bratří].

Religious order of the Roman Catholic Church, sometimes incorrectly termed ‘Brothers of Mercy’ (a different 19th-century order). Founded by St John of God in Spain in 1537, they were recognized by Pope Pius V in 1572 and adopted the Rule of St Augustine. However, only a few Hospitallers were ordained priest: their work was primarily medical. They were prominent in missionary work, and dozens of hospitals were established in South America in the 17th century. They achieved their greatest expansion in the 18th century, with thousands of brothers serving some 300 hospitals. After the French Revolution, many hospitals were secularized, but during the first half of the 20th century there was again a notable expansion of the order worldwide, once more with a missionary emphasis.

In the Habsburg Empire in the second half of the 18th century, the Hospitallers were committed to church music of a high standard but did not buy in the services of outside regentes chori. Consequently, the brothers seem often to have been recruited for their musical skills, which were cultivated together with surgery and botany. Franz Fismann, Provincial of the order in the 1770s, was active in maintaining links between the Hospitallers in Austria and composers in other countries. The Habsburg aristocracy often acted as patrons to the order, both in setting up hospitals and in employing individual brothers; and a network of personal contacts between composers (the most prominent being Haydn) and members of the order ensured that the Hospitallers constantly had access to substantial new compositions. Joseph II limited the number of brothers in each hospital to 16, but the institutions may have been able (as the hospital at Kuks certainly was) to gain exemption from the Josephine restrictions on elaborate church music.

Hosseschrueders, Jan [Juan].

SeeHazen.

Hoste [L’Hoste, L’Osto, Oste] da Reggio [Torresano, Bartolomeo]

(bc1520; d 1569). Italian composer. Previously confused with other musicians (e.g. Spirito da Reggio, Hoste Flamengo), Hoste da Reggio can now be identified as Bartolomeo Torresano, son of Guido Torresano (or Torreggiano), an innkeeper from Reggio nell’Emilia. He appears under this name as maestro di cappella of Milan Cathedral in 1558–63. An anonymous painting (Brescia, private collection), showing a priest holding Hoste’s Primo libro de madrigali a quattro (open to the madrigal Occhi leggiadri), is presumed to be a portrait of the composer. He began a career as a church musician at an early age. By the 1540s he was in Milan, where he was being received into the homes of the leading nobility. The conjecture that the composer is the ‘Hoste’ named as an interlocutor in Antonfrancesco Doni’s Dialogo della musica (1544) is supported by Doni’s reference to ‘pre Bartholomeo’ who played in the home of Massimiliano Stampa (where Doni had been a guest from October 1541). Hoste’s first two publications were dedicated to important churchmen: the madrigals to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga and the volume of sacred works to Gianbattista Grosso, Bishop of Reggio nell’Emilia. Perhaps through these connections, he earned the favour of Ferrante Gonzaga, governor of Milan, who took him into his service (probably for the music at S Maria della Scala). Here, before 1549, he met the young Lassus, who had come to Milan as part of the governor’s retinue. Host’s subsequent books of madrigals are mostly dedicated to members of the Gonzaga family, three of them to Ferrante himself. This did him little good, however, for Ferrante, mistrusted by the Spanish monarchy, was replaced as governor by the Duke of Alba. Hoste lost his post, but in August 1555 he received a prebend (formerly belonging to Nicola Vincentino) at S Calimero, Milan, where he agreed to fulfil the duties of canon himself (unlike Vicento, who had named a substitute). In January 1558 he was appointed maestro di cappella at Milan Cathedral. He left the post in 1563, probably for health reasons, resuming his duties at S Calimero until at least June 1567, when he was appointed maestro di cappella at S Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, a post which he held for less than a year. In 1568 he gave his approval to the construction of a new type of ‘arpicordo’, designed by the Milanese Giovan Antonio Brena; he died the following year, bequeathing 100 lire to the construction of a new organ for S Calimero.

Hoste’s madrigals show an expert grasp of a number of mid-16th-century stylistic elements. Many of them are written a note nere, making use of the syncopated points of imitation and the contrasts of fast and slow motion typical of that kind of madrigal. Others use varied rhythmic values in a declamatory, quasi-parlando style like that of the madrigale arioso popular in the 1550s. The music is full of false relations and contrastingly bright and dark chordal sounds and in general is far from tame harmonically; there are occasional augmented chords and some unusual cadential progressions. Hoste set a number of stanzas from Orlando furioso, including a cycle (xxxii. 37, 40, 43) in which one madrigal uses a set melodic formula in the superius throughout the piece.